Dr. Dean Ornish on How to "Undo" Damage to Your Health
Dr. Dean Ornish is a pioneer in lifestyle medicine who is challenging and changing the status quo of how we treat disease — arguing we all have the power to transform our fate simply by the choices we make every single day. Dr. Ornish has been a driving force and inspiration to Dr. Oz since his early days in medical school. In this interview, Dean and his wife Anne join Dr. Oz to reveal how we can all press our inner “undo button” for better health with advice from their new book “Undo It: How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
When you make big changes in your lifestyle, what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise, how much love and support we get, or to reduce it to its essence, to eat well, move more, stress less, love more, the more diseases we study and the more mechanisms we look at, the more reasons we have to show why, how quickly you can feel better in ways that matter most.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. podcast.
He's a pioneer in lifestyle medicine who is challenging and changing the status quo of how we treat disease, arguing that we all have the power to transform our faith simply by the choices we make every single day.
Dr. Dean Ornish has been a driving force and inspiration to me since my early days in medical school.
Today, Dean and his wife Annie, Ann, not Annie, are joining us today to reveal how we can all press our inner undo button for better health in their new book, Undo It, How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.
And Dean, thanks for being here.
I've got Lisa with me as well.
We've got to pepper you with questions in the time we have together.
Thank you.
It's a great pleasure.
Undo It's beautifully written.
Before I dive into the book itself, I'd love, Dean, if you can share a tiny bit about the suffering that you've experienced and how it's helped you transform yourself, but also the message you have to so many.
You have the only, to my knowledge, Medicare-approved program for people recovering from heart disease to hopefully prevent them from having more problems.
To get that done took...
Decades of hard work, solid data, and rolling the big rock uphill because most folks didn't think that there was enough to what you were saying to believe in it, to validate it, to pay for it.
And now we know that it does.
It took its toll.
Well, that was a different kind of suffering, but I think what you're referring to is what really got me interested in doing this work in the first place, and this was long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away when I was a freshman in college at Rice University in Houston, and I got suicidally depressed when I was there, and I It's a long story, but the short version is that I felt like I was stupid, that now I'm in a school with a bunch of really smart people.
It was just a matter of time before they figured out that they made a mistake in letting me in.
And worse than that, I had a spiritual crisis, which was that I realized that nothing can really bring lasting happiness.
And so the combination of feeling like I was never going to mount anything, and even if I did, it wouldn't matter, I looked around and thought, well, you know, dead people look like they're peaceful.
Maybe I'll just do myself in and would have done so.
Came about as close to doing that as you can without actually following through with it.
But I got so run down and sick, I got such a horrible case of infectious mononucleosis that I didn't really have the energy to even get out of bed.
Meanwhile, my parents realized that I wasn't doing well, came down, went home to Dallas to recuperate, and my plan was to get well enough to kill myself, as crazy as that sounds.
Meanwhile, my older sister, who had been a child of the 60s, this was back in 1972, had benefited from studying with an ecumenical spiritual teacher named Swami Satchidananda.
Who, by the way, liked to make puns, and when people said, what are you, a Hindu?
He'd say, no, I'm an Undo, which is part of why the title of this book is kind of an homage to that.
And he said, he came up with a little lecture, and this was really weird in Dallas, I mean, today it'd be weird, but especially back in 1972, having a swami come to your home and having a cocktail party for him.
But anyway, he gave a satsang, a lecture in our living room, and he started off by saying, nothing can bring you lasting happiness, which I'd already figured out, except I was ready to do myself in, and he was glowing.
And he went on to say what really turned my life around, which is that nothing can bring us that, but that we're born happy.
Our nature is to be happy and peaceful and unusually healthy.
And not being mindful of that, we often run after so many things.
The whole advertising industry reinforces that, gee, if only you had more whatever, more money, more power, more beauty, more accomplishment, then you'd be happy, then you'd be healthy, then you wouldn't be so lonely, then people would love you, and then everything would be good.
And once you set up that view of the world, however it turns out, you generally don't feel so good because until you get it, you feel stressed.
If someone else gets it and you don't, then you feel really bad.
And even if you get it, in the moment it's very seductive.
It's like, ah, I got it.
It's great.
But it's soon followed more often than not by either now what?
It's never enough.
Or so what?
Big deal.
It doesn't really provide that lasting sense of meaning.
So one patient said, you know, the letdown that comes from accomplishing a goal is so great, I always make sure I've got a dozen projects going at the same time.
And so what these practices do, whether secular or religious, meditation and yoga and prayer, whatever form you do them in, is that they don't bring us a sense of peace.
They don't just simply help us cope with stress better.
But rather, they quiet down our mind and body to allow us to experience more of an inner sense of peace and joy and well-being and to realize that's our natural state.
And then, I mean, it may sound like we're parsing words here, but the implications are that if we have to get it from outside ourselves, then everyone and everything that we think we need has power over us.
But to the degree that we have it already, then it empowers us.
And then the question changes from, how can I get what I think I need to, how can I stop disturbing what I already have?
And so, you know, when you and I were both trained as doctors, we weren't trained to see suffering as a doorway for transformation.
But it really is, because as you know, change is hard.
But if you're hurting enough, then the idea of change can become more motivating, as it was for me.
My doorway was depression.
Someone else, it might be a heart attack, or it might be a diagnosis of cancer or Alzheimer's or something like that.
And in that moment, there's a motivational opportunity to say, look, we've learned in 40 years of research, this is what our new book is really about.
These underlying biological mechanisms are so dynamic that when you make big changes in your lifestyle, what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise, how much love and support we get, or to reduce it to its essence, to eat well, move more, stress less, love more...
The more diseases we study and the more mechanisms we look at, the more reasons we have to show how quickly you can feel better in ways that matter most.
I'm sure you've had patients who've told you the same thing, that having a heart attack was the best thing that ever happened.
The first time somebody told me that, I'd say, what are you, nuts?
And they'd say, no, that's what it took to get my attention to begin making these changes that have transformed my life.
But so often we're not really trained to take advantage of that.
We're trained to just use surgery or drugs or We're good to go.
So the wisdom that you have and offer and undo it is, as you go through it, reinforcing and validating the folks who figured it out.
But I'm always stunned that many people haven't and are still struggling.
And to your point, the wake-up call of a heart problem or stroke or just about any major health crisis is often appreciated by some but not by all.
And why do you think...
The emotional connection to our health is so overlooked in Western medicine.
Why is it so hardwired to not be observed?
Well I think that especially these days it's a matter of just being so overwhelmed with what's going on around us and that's what the power of meditation is to just take a moment here and there throughout our day to relax and relieve our stress which then allows us to raise our self-awareness so that we can tap into you know why do we want to live longer why do we want to make healthier choices So to the extent that we are
in touch with our motivation to be in touch with what arises for us when we reflect on what are the moments and the people that inspire us to live longer, to live better.
When we connect those dots between what we do and how it makes us feel, then we can intentionally Make healthier choices to do the things that we love with the people that we love.
And it becomes immediately self-fulfilling and therefore sustainable.
So when we have the self-awareness and compassion for ourselves to do so, then it makes it easier to imbue our choices with meaning and therefore making them more sustainable.
So it goes back to not to be assumed that everybody does want to live longer and better.
That's why we have the high levels of addiction and depression that we do.
So to the extent that we can make those moments for self-reflection and connect those dots for us in a very personal way.
It's a very personal question what motivates you.
But once you identify what that is for yourself, It can become incredibly empowering.
Yeah, and I think the other thing you touched on earlier, Mehmet, was that the medical system, as it's evolved, we have 8 to 10 minutes with a patient, and there's really not much time to talk about what matters most when you only have such a short time.
You go through the electronic medical record, the problem list, listen to the heart and lungs.
Write a prescription.
It's really not satisfying for the doctor or the patient.
That's why I spent 16 years to try and finally get, for which we're really grateful, CMS to provide Medicare coverage and create a new benefit category.
So now instead of a 10-minute visit, it's a 72-hour visit.
And as you know, we've been working together with ShareCare to train hospitals and clinics and physician groups and health systems around the country.
And it's working.
We're getting bigger changes in lifestyle, better clinical outcomes, bigger cost savings, and better adherence than anyone's ever shown.
And so often when people are put on drugs to lower their cholesterol or their blood pressure or their blood sugar and they say, You know, doctor, how long do I have to take these?
The doctor usually says, forever.
And as you know, sometimes when I lecture, I show a cartoon of doctors busily mopping up the floor around a sink that's overflowing.
It's like, how long do I have to mop up the floor?
Like, forever.
Why don't we just turn off the faucet?
And so listeners should know that under their doctor's supervision, when they follow these changes that we talk about in our new book, many people can reduce or get off these medications, can avoid surgery that they otherwise might have had.
And it's not only medically effective, but it saves a lot of money in the short run as well.
There's lots more when we come back.
Let's get into the concretes of the elements of this plant.
So, obviously being motivated, having a way of figuring out why you're doing it is vital, but then there are the actual specific steps.
I remember when Dr. Atkins was still alive, you battled him.
Cordially, on his philosophy on weight loss and what was the benefit of weight loss if it was done the right way versus the wrong way.
And we're back now in the midst of a low-carb, high-fat craze with keto diets and paleo diets.
What about these diets do you not like?
And walk us through what you have found to be successful in reducing the inflammation and the complications of atherosclerosis that often result from the sad standard American diet.
Right.
I debated Dr. Atkins many times.
In fact, at the American College of Cardiology in front of like 4,000 doctors years ago, I stopped doing those kinds of debates.
He was the low-carb guy, so I got pegged as the low-fat guy, but it's never been about just fat.
It's a whole foods, plant-based diet.
Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, in their natural forms, low-fat and low-sugar.
And we need to get past this whole fat versus carbs debate.
I mean, you know, Dr. Atkins, they say he slipped and hit his head, but his autopsy result was published and it showed that he died of massive heart failure.
And I'd love to be able to tell people that Atkins or Keto or Paleo died, which are really just different incarnations of the same thing.
Are good for you, but they're not.
And you can lose weight on it, but you can lose weight in lots of ways that aren't healthy.
You know, smoking cigarettes is a good way to lose weight.
Chemotherapy, getting suicide depressed is, I lost a lot of weight, not something I'd recommend.
But you want to lose weight in a way that's healthy.
And one of the diagrams that we show in our book is from a New England Journal of Medicine article by Stephen Smith that reviewed different diets, and it showed what happens in your arteries on different diets.
And what they found was that In a whole foods plant-based diet, like we've been talking about, your arteries are clean.
The blood's flowing.
There's no blockages there.
As you mentioned, a standard American diet, which has the great acronym of a SAD diet, they're partially clogged.
And on a keto, paleo, Atkins diet, they're severely clogged, even if you lose weight, or even if sometimes your triglycerides go down.
And yet we found that you can lose even more weight and have even more improvement in your chemistries by making these changes.
And instead of mortgaging your health, it enhances it.
And one of the things that we talk about in this new book is what I call a unifying theory.
And that is that I was trained, like you were and like all doctors were, to view heart disease and diabetes and prostate cancer and so on as being fundamentally different.
You know, different diseases, different diagnoses, different treatments.
But I've come to believe that they're really the same disease manifesting and masquerading in different forms.
And I say that because they all share the same underlying biological mechanisms.
You mentioned chronic inflammation, but also oxidative stress, changes in the microbiome, and Gene expression and telomeres and angiogenesis and so on.
And each one of these mechanisms is directly influenced by what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise we get, and how much love and support we have.
And how quickly these changes can occur for better and for worse.
And it's not just the fat versus the carbs.
The animal protein itself seems to activate all of these mechanisms.
And so when you go on a plant-based diet...
You actually reduce all of these diseases.
And we found that with all this talk about personalized medicine, I mean, if you're talking about a targeted immunotherapy for a particular pancreatic cancer cell line, it's awesome.
But for the vast majority of chronic diseases, it was the same lifestyle program over 40 years of research, which I think really sets our work apart from everyone else's, that we've actually proven these things can actually reverse heart disease, diabetes, prostate cancer, High blood pressure, high cholesterol, change your genes.
We published a study with Craig Venter who first decoded the human genome.
Over 500 genes were changed in just three months, turning on the good genes, turning off the bad genes.
We did a study with Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn who got the Nobel Prize for discovering Telomeres into our chromosomes that regulate how long we live.
We showed for the first time these same lifestyle changes could lengthen your telomeres.
And when we published this in The Lancet, the premier international medical journal, the editors called it reversing aging at a cellular level.
And we're now doing the first randomized trial to see if we can actually reverse the progression of early stage Alzheimer's disease.
I think we're at a place with Alzheimer's where we were With heart disease 40 years ago, we have every reason to think that it might work.
And since there are no good drugs for treating or for preventing it, it would be really exciting if we can show that.
And by the way, if any listeners happen to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, we're still recruiting patients for that.
It's all done at no cost to you.
So the more diseases we study and the more mechanisms we look at, the more evidence we have to show how quickly so many of these chronic diseases can be reversed.
And the only side effects, unlike most things we do, are good ones.
Dean, you've said that, and you know I'm a vegetarian forever and totally support everything you say, but you've said that a vegetarian diet may not make you live longer, but it will feel like you're living longer just because it's so painful.
How do you guys, how do you and Anne make this a pleasurable experience?
So if you're living to a ripe old age, it's not torture eating your kale and Carrots.
Well, you know better than anyone how, I mean, I've been in your home, your food is, your refrigerators are stocked with the most delicious food.
That was actually a quote from Mark Twain, who I think has said, Doc, if I give up wine, women, and song, will I live longer?
And he said, no, it may seem longer.
He said, well, I may give up singing, you know.
But, you know, you can eat bad, I mean, healthy food that's delicious and unhealthy food that's not.
It's really, great chefs know how to make great food.
Lisa, you're an awesome chef.
I mean, you know better than anyone.
Anne, do you want to add to that?
Well, it's also never been easier to eat this way and have it taste delicious.
I mean, it's hard to find a restaurant that doesn't offer some kind of vegetarian, even vegan.
So I think a lot of it is having your intention line up with your So to the extent that you can shop at the store and stock up in your car, at the office by your desk, in your purse, wherever you can have snacks so you make it easy to make the healthy choice.
In fact, we have a whole appendix section in the book that has commercially available frozen foods.
So you can have these in your freezer and pull out a frozen meal.
There are tons of products that we don't have any financial agreements with, but they're in Target and Safeway and Kroger's.
Every commercially available store, no matter where you live, even 7-Elevens, they're making it easier to eat this way and for it to be delicious.
So it's finding what you like, the plant-based meats that are out there.
If you like sausage, you like burgers, you like meatballs, there are plant-based analogs to those that, to me, taste so much better.
I mean, a lot of it is not only how it tastes as it hits your palate, but also how it energizes you, how you feel after you've eaten it and for the hour or two How it feels to digest those things when you sleep at night.
So for me, those benefits are...
First of all, I think it tastes so much better because your palate does adjust to...
We're appreciating the ingredients of not just meat but the spices that you use and how those things are prepared so that the oil doesn't overwhelm or the sauces don't overwhelm to the extent that we can eat from the farmers markets that you might be able to To take advantage of.
The fresh foods are the most flavorful foods.
So eating this way, I think, is the most flavorful.
And it, to me, creates instant energy throughout the day.
And let me just...
I'm laughing because there's one of the things in the first chapter that I mention is a scene from an upcoming movie that James Cameron and Luis Tsai Hoyos did called Game Changers.
And James Cameron, you know, the legendary director who did Titanic and Avatar and Terminator, all those great movies, went on a Whole Foods plant-based diet about 10 years ago with his wife Susie.
And he did it initially for...
They did it for environmental reasons because, as you know, what's good for you is good for the planet and that...
More global warming is caused by livestock consumption than all forms of transportation combined.
And it takes 14 times more resources to make a pound of meat-based protein than plant-based protein.
So no one really need go hungry if enough people move to a plant-based diet.
But the big misconception is, as you mentioned, Lisa, it's like, am I going to live longer?
Is it going to seem longer?
Am I going to be a wuss?
I need meat to be manly and strong or womanly and strong.
And so they did this great scene with these three...
Well, first, the whole movie is about how elite athletes have raised their game when they went on a plant-based diet.
They became Olympic medalists and mixed martial artists, national champions, and heavyweight boxers and NFL superstars like Tom Brady and others.
But there's this one scene where they have these three elite guys, athletes in their mid-20s, and they feed them a single meat-based meal, and they have a urologist measure the frequency and hardness of their erections that they have at night when they sleep.
It's a normal function guys have, keeps everything, all the plumbing in order.
And, Mamet, you've written about that and done shows about that.
Yep.
And they've measured that, and then they gave them...
And this was organic chicken and beef and really high grass-fed beef and so on.
And then they did the same thing the next night with a single plant-based meal and measured them again.
And they found that all three of them had...
3-500% more frequent erections and 10-15% harder erections after a single plant-based meal than a single meat-based meal.
In fact, the film crew went on a plant-based diet after filming that.
And I say that because it shows how powerful and how dynamic these mechanisms are.
We need to get away from, oh, I'm eating today to prevent something really bad from happening years down the road.
That's not really sustainable.
But if it makes you feel good, if it makes your sexual function better, fun and pleasure and love and feeling good are really what make this sustainable.
And because these mechanisms are so dynamic, when you make these changes to the degree you make them at any age, most people find they feel so much better so quickly.
And as Anne mentioned, you literally connect the dots between what you do and how you feel.
It reframes the reason for making these changes from fear of dying or fear that something bad might happen like a heart attack or stroke or whatever to joy and pleasure and love and feeling good And that's what makes it sustainable.
And I can tell you, your brain gets more blood.
You think more clearly.
You have more energy.
You can actually grow so many new brain neurons.
Your brain can get bigger.
Your skin gets more blood.
You look younger.
Your heart gets more blood.
You can reverse heart disease.
Your sexual organs get more blood flow.
And for many people, these are choices worth making.
Literally connect the dots as Ann said.
When I do this, I feel good.
When I do that, I don't feel so good.
So let me do more of this and less of that.
And because it comes out of your own experience, then you really believe it and you know it's true.
More questions after the break.
You mentioned sex a couple of times in your last answer.
And I just want to go there because most health books will have a dietary component and an exercise component and a stress modification component.
And you add one more, which is Love More, which doesn't really seem to be the typical health platform.
So can you just explain why Love More is?
Well, I'd like Anne to talk about that, but Love More includes sex or romantic love, but it's not limited to that.
But, you know, study after study has shown that people who are lonely and depressed and isolated, which I think is the real epidemic in our culture, which is how we got into this discussion at the beginning, how I got involved in this, that sense of depression, people who are lonely and depressed are three to ten times more likely to get sick and die prematurely from virtually all causes when compared to those who have a sense of love and connection and community.
And I don't know anything that has that powerful an impact.
So, Anne, you want to talk more about that?
I think it really comes back to what we were talking about initially, of, you know, why are you motivated to live longer, better?
And what really unlocks that is an expression of self-love, loving yourself well enough to foster and cultivate your highest, healthiest self.
So, you know, when we have that sense of curiosity and compassion for ourselves, why am I making the lifestyle choices that I do?
Why do I hang out with the people that I do and talk about the things that we do and therefore have the behaviors that we do?
A lot of it can be on autopilot without us really feeling gratified by those choices.
But when we have enough curiosity and self-awareness to connect those dots and to love ourselves with that sense of compassion, it's only then that we can have more loving and compassionate relations with others.
I think Maya Angelou said, be wary of the person who tells you, I love you.
But they don't love themselves.
It has to be an inside job.
All of this is a very inside job.
We can have very well intended doctors, spouses, friends, colleagues say, you know, you really should eat this way.
You really should walk more.
You know, stress less, these kinds of things.
But until we've had, we've accumulated enough, you know, decisions, behaviors that lead to our own very personal suffering and we're just sick of it.
We said, you know, literally and figuratively say enough.
I don't like feeling this way.
I want to try something more.
I want to be a better version of myself.
That really starts turning the tide.
And the ripple effect goes into, maybe I'll start eating this.
Well, this seems like, you know, low-hanging fruit, so to speak.
And then you start to feel a little bit better.
You say, I'm going to get up, start moving more.
And, oh my gosh, I'm really stressed out.
I want to actually calm my nervous system, have more energy.
Of an anchor throughout my day.
Have more clarity and connection with those around me.
All of this starts from a moment of loving ourselves more.
And there's a lot of ways that we can do that by starting even with gratitude for where we are, what we have, those around us.
That is a very powerful, these are subtle but very significant ways in which we start to transform our life.
The heart pumps, as you remember, the heart pumps blood to itself first so that it can take care of the rest of the body.
So you can't give what you don't have.
When you love yourself, you have that much more love to give.
And our work is really all about saying, what's the cause?
And clearly, information is important.
That's why your shows are so important that you and Lisa do.
But it's usually not enough because, I mean, if it were, nobody would smoke.
It's not like you say, hey, did you know smoking is bad for you?
Today we're going to teach you something you didn't know.
You know, it's like it's on every pack of cigarettes.
And I've had patients say, you know, I'd ask people, I'd say, why do you smoke and overeat and drink too much and work too hard and abuse opioids and play too many video games?
These behaviors seem so maladaptive.
They say, you don't get it, Dean.
These behaviors are very adaptive.
They help us deal with our loneliness, our depression.
I've had patients say things like, I've got 20 friends in this pack of cigarettes and they're always there for me and nobody else is.
You know, are you going to take away my 20 friends?
Or food fills the void.
Or fat coats my nerves and numbs the pain.
Or opioids or alcohol or other drugs numb the pain.
Or video games numb the pain.
Or working all the time numbs the pain.
And so we've learned that information is important and focusing on behavior is important.
But if we can focus on the deeper issues, that sense of love and connection and community, that anything that brings us together is healing.
You know, whether it's romantic love or whether it's having a dog or just spending time.
And that the time that we spend with our friends and family isn't a luxury to do after you've done all the important stuff.
That it really is the important stuff.
And when we work at that level, we find that people are much more likely to make and maintain lifestyle choices that are life-enhancing than ones that are self-destructive.
In our closing moments, I wanted to give you a platform, Dean, because you did a lot of the pioneering work in this to help explain why this really matters to your body.
There's a unifying hypothesis.
You cover four steps, by the way, I should brag about this a little bit, and undo it.
There are four steps that Dean and Ann have divided this battle into.
But the biggest epiphany that I've had from all this is that you can't separate heart disease, stroke, cancer, autoimmune problems, intestinal issues.
There's an overarching relationship they have.
And if you could just give us a quick summary of that, it would be hugely helpful for the listeners.
Yeah, the radical unifying theory that we put forth in this new book is that these are all the same diseases manifesting in different forms because they all share the same underlying biological mechanism.
It's one reason why you often see that patients have what are called comorbidities.
They'll have the same multiple diseases.
They'll have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, overweight, diabetes, and heart disease, for example.
And yet it's not It's because they're really the same disease masquerading in different forms.
And so it radically simplifies what we have to do.
Eat well, move more, stress less, love more.
Boom, that's it.
The more diseases we study, the more mechanisms we look at, the more evidence we show that these same simple changes, it's not like there's one thing for this disease and this one for that one.
It's the same for all of them.
And when you do them, first of all, you can not only help reverse these diseases, but if you can reverse it, then you can prevent it.
It's the ounce of prevention and pound of cure.
It takes a lot less energy to prevent something.
But more than the point, you feel so much better in ways that matter most We're all going to die.
The mortality rate is still 100%.
It's one per person.
So the question is how well we live, not just how long we live.
And these are lifestyle choices that we talk about in our new book that make life so much more joyful and meaningful and juicy and loving and sweet as well as healthy.
So you gave us the four steps.
I heard love more.
What were the other three?
Eat well, a whole foods, plant-based diet, low in fat and sugar.
Move more, you know, a half an hour of walking or whatever exercise, preferably some strength training and stretching in there as well.
Stress less, not simply to avoid stress, but to manage it more effectively.
The kind of techniques that Ann so beautifully talked about, stretching, breathing, meditation, those simple techniques, just a few minutes a day can make your fuse longer.
And love more.
It's as simple as that.
You know, the book begins with one of my favorite quotes by Albert Einstein, which is, if you can't make it simple, you don't understand it well enough.
And by having spent four decades doing this work, we just really got it down to its essence here.
Well, I want to applaud you for doing a wonderful job bringing it all together into one tone.
And I applaud you also for changing the way our nation sees, heart disease in particular, but chronic illness in general.
What you've done by creating these programs that are now used all around the country, these orders of plans to reverse.
And when I say reverse, just to be clear, it's not that all the plaque disappears, it's that the problems that come from the plaque and other issues in the arteries are remarkably diminished.
And when you have people walking around who are on heart transplant lists, And now doing so well, they don't need really much of anything except to love more because they've done the first three steps so well.
It's a tribute to your accomplishments.
So congratulations to both of you.
Again, the book, Undo It.
You can find out lots more from Dean Ornish and his wife, Anne, in this book.
And you also figure out, because the subtitle is, How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.
This is not an airplane cockpit you're walking into.
These are simple, observable steps.
To quote Einstein again from...
Via Dean.
If you really understand it well, then everyone can get it, and that's what he's done.
God bless you both.
And deep out to you and Lisa for continuing to raise awareness.
We're really grateful, and even more for your friendship.
